A Van Makes Life a Little Easier for Lander’s Eastern Shoshone Children

The Eastern Shoshone Children’s Lodge, a group home for children on reservation land, provides an essential temporary space for Eastern Shoshone youth who are in need of a safe shelter or home. The goal is to reunite these children with family or to find a kinship placement, but it can take time—30 to 60 days—to complete background checks and find an appropriate family or kinship placement. During that time, the children still need to get to school, medical appointments, family visitations, therapy appointments, etc., but the Lander Eastern Shoshone children being assisted by the Department of Family Services (DFS) do not have transportation to get them to school, doctors appointments, and family visits. So the founders of the Eastern Shoshone Children’s Lodge—where children can stay while the details of their placements are being worked out—came up with an idea: Purchase a van to transport Lander Eastern Shoshone children to necessary services and activities while they are involved with DFS. They just needed a little help with funding to secure a second-hand vehicle. In this short video, the Eastern Shoshone Children’s lodge founders outline just how imperative the van is to helping keep as many as 300 children a year stay connected to their families and communities.